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What was this attachment to the man? Was it really just the memory of the helicopter rides, the spacious suite, the hooker, a tailor’s tape, a lapel pin? Could it really be so banal? Or were those things standing in for something else, something more encompassing and elusive? Father always called America the land of opportunity. Hardly original, I know. But I wonder: Opportunity for whom? For him, right? The opportunity to become whatever he desired? Sure, others, too, but only insofar as others really meant him. And isn’t that what Mary was saying all those years ago? That our vaunted American dream, the dream of ourselves enhanced and enlarged, is the flag for which we are willing to sacrifice everything—gouging our neighbors, despoiling our nation—everything, that is, except ourselves? A dream that imagines the flourishing of others as nothing more than a road sign, the prick of envy as the provident spur to one’s own all-important realization? Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity? I think Father was looking for an image of just how much more his American self could contain than the Pakistani one he’d left behind. I think he wanted to know what the limits were. In America, you could have anything, right? Even the presidency? If an idiot like Trump could get hold of it, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t want it? After all, the idiot apparently didn’t want it, either. He just wanted to know he could have it. Or maybe the emphasis there needs to shift: he wanted to know he could have it. Yes. I think that’s right. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to Trump’s ascendancy as the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the sanctum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one, an event in our political life that signals the collapse not of democracy—which has, in truth, enabled it—but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing. De Tocqueville would not be surprised. My father is no exception. Trump is just the name of his story.
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